1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a computer system and method for electronically facilitating all aspects of projects, including the project bid process, requisition process, spend process and performance management process, and specifically to electronically managing and analyzing all aspects of the projects.
2. Description of Related Art
Corporations, businesses and other types of enterprises regularly utilize third party providers (vendors) to handle various business functions, such as providing a good or service. Typically, these outsourced business functions are performed under a “project,” “staff supplementation” or “consulting” (hereinafter collectively referred to as “project work”) agreement between the buyer and the vendor. The various tasks involved in project work, such as vendor engagement, project administration, resource management and project accounting, can be extremely complex, entailing the convergence of numerous buyer organizational departments, such as purchasing, finance, operations, legal, human resources, security and the project management organization.
Due to the complexity of project work, it has become standard in today's business environment to employ multiple systems and processes to facilitate the management of project work. For example, typically, separate systems and processes are used for one or more aspects of project work, such as vendor qualification, bid solicitation, bid response, bid evaluation, contract administration, milestone/deliverable administration, payment vouchering and quality control. Currently, there exists on-line “bid” and “auction” systems for handling the bid solicitation and bid response processes, project management tracking systems for providing the milestone/deliverable administration process and financial processing systems for administering the payment vouchering process. However, there does not exist a single system for managing all aspects of project work.